Districts Defer Repairs As Budgets Shrink

The nation's school buildings, many of them at least half a century
old, are deteriorating far faster than they are being repaired, leading
in some cases to school closings, near accidents, and a demoralizing
learning environment. The cost of needed repairs and new construction
may total more than $25 billion.

This is the situation depicted by school-maintenance officials in
several states and an unreleased survey by three Washington-based
education associations of 100 school systems in different parts of the
country.

Renovation and Replacement Costs

Figures from the National Center for Education Statistics and the
survey indicate that the proportion of school-system budgets devoted to
maintenance has fallen from 14.1 percent in 1920 to 11 percent in 1950
to 6.7 percent in 1982. The result, the survey and interviews suggest,
is that many school systems are now facing major renovation and
replacement costs that, many say, could have been avoided if needed
maintenance had been conducted over the years.

"We've been falling behind for years," said Henry H. Baxter, an
assistant superintendent responsible for construction in Buffalo, where
nearly three-quarters of the 75 school buildings are more than 50 years
old. "Now we are really in a crunch. Even the mortar between the bricks
is deteriorating." Buffalo has $35-million-worth of unfinished
replacement and reconstruction work.

Other examples of the severity of the problem:

In Seattle, the school system has $175 million in approved
maintenance and capital construction that it has not completed. Its
entire 1982-83 budget is $167 million.

Three years ago, the Portland school system employed 299 craftsmen
in 16 different trades, said Merton W. Lindsay, director of system's
physical plant. That number is down to 185 now. The system has a
backlog of $82 million in deferred-maintainance and major
reconstruction projects.

"We've got a lot of 50-to-60-year-old buildings that haven't been
touched yet," Mr. Lindsay said. "A few years ago, we found a brick
facing that was coming apart from the cement wall behind it. We caught
it just before the whole wall landed in the playground. There are
probably other walls like that, but we don't have the money to do the
testing."

The New York City school system, with an annual budget of $3
billion, is the largest in the country. It also has the largest
deferred-maintenance budget: $680 million. The school system was
recently told by the Mayor's office to cut $73 million from its current
budget.

Residents of Tucson, Ariz., will vote this week on a $210-million
bond issue that would be used to build 13 new schools in order to
alleviate what Nolan M. Von Roeder, assistant superintendent of
maintenance, calls "terrible overcrowding" in the city's schools.
"We've got 10, 12, 14 of those portable buildings out in the
playgrounds," he said.

The 100 school systems included in the survey conducted jointly by
the Council of Great City Schools, the American Association of School
Administrators, and the National School Boards Association now spend
about $1.2 billion a year on maintenance and capital construction
projects. They have accumulated a repair backlog of $3.4 billion. The
backlog includes only repairs for which expenditures have been
approved.

In a report summarizing the findings of the survey, the associations
estimate that if all of the nation's 15,500 school systems have a
maintenance backlog that is as large (220 percent) in comparison to
their maintenance budgets then the total backlog for all of the
nation's schools would be at least $25 billion. The estimate is based
on the fact that the 100 districts in the survey spend an average of
6.7 percent of their annu-al budgets on maintenance and on the
assumption that the National Center for Education Statistics is correct
when it says that the nation's 15,500 districts spent about $105
billion each year.

The problem by far the most often mentioned by the 100 districts was
roof repair and replacement. Seventy-one percent of the school systems
said roof work was needed. Twenty-seven percent mentioned heating,
ventilating, and air-conditioning repairs and replacement as a
priority. Other needed school repairs and reconstruction range from
boiler replacements to asbestos removal, repairs of damage from
vandalism, and improving access for the handicapped.

"Plumbing, electrical wiring, and heating systems in many schools
are dangerously out-of-date; roofing is below code in thousands of
schools; and school-operated transit systems are judged by some to be
unsafe," the report says.

The result of the deteriorating physical condition of the schools,
the report says, is not only increasing numbers of disruptions in class
routine and reduced efficiency and productivity, "but a deteriorated
sense of confidence among the public in our education facilities."

"Worn-out, shabby, and unsafe facilities create impressions of the
educational capabliites of the schools," the report adds. Observers
note several reasons why school systems are suddenly facing such large
repair and reconstruction costs.

"We've been through an era [the baby-boom years of the 1960's and
early 1970's] when it was a higher priority to provide facilities than
to maintain them," said Paul Barger, director of support services for
the Dallas school system, where Superintendent Linus Wright is
preparing a $100-million bond package to fund repairs and construction
in the city's 215 school buildings.

Sharply higher fuel costs (Chicago's schools' electrical costs rose
by 494 percent between 1972 and 1980, according to the associations'
report), state tax- and expenditure-limitation measures (29 states have
enacted them since 1977), and the age of many schools (100 of Chicago's
585 schools, for example, were built before 1900) were also mentioned
by school officials and in the report. The associations' survey
included large and small school systems from urban, suburban, and rural
areas in 35 states.

It focused, however, on school systems in Congressional districts
represented by members of the House and Senate public-works committees.
The findings will be presented, along with the accompanying report, to
those committees as part of an effort by the three associations to
include the repair of schools in public-works and jobs legislation that
is expected to be considered by Congress in the months ahead.

The cost of repairing the nation's so-called infrastructure of
bridges, ports, roads, waterways, and sewer systems is estimated by
financial experts to be between $2.5 trillion and $3 trillion.

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